The Civil Protection To The Property Interests In The Right Of Personality

With the tendency of merchandising in the market-oriented economy, some factors of the right to personality, such as the name, image, voice and so on, which have not possibly been featured in merchandising, are increasingly made the use in the commercial advertisements, brand spokesmen, goods promotion and any other formations of commercial uses. These personality factors not only have capacity to identify persons, but also create potentials to make fortune for right holders. It has been lasting and developing for approximately one century that the personality right would include not only the spirit interests but also property interests. However, there is no country in the worldwide which has already established complete and systematic fundamental theory and framework for legislations or judicial precedents to supply comprehensive protections to the property interest in the personality right. Furthmore, there exit great gaps in definitions, measures of protections, the ranges, causes of actions as well between the civil law system and the common law system. Moreover, even in the same law family, it has not unified the understanding to this legal issue. In China, when someone infringes the property interests in the personality right, the right holders at present are not able to get suitable and sufficient remedies for their damage, because of no specific regulation in this field in the current legislations. Since the existing loopholes of protections decreases cost of infringement, the unsuitable application of legislations and judicial precedents give rise to that cases are complicated and tough to handle without appropriate protections from the private law system and the legal remedies.This thesis would comprise six parts, making use of analysis methods of the legal doctrine and the definition and comparative law research in order to analyze and discuss the civil protection of the property interests in the personality right. Therefore, this thesis is based on acknowledging and affirming the property interests in the personality right and composed with following parts. Firstly, in the first part, through the analysis methods of the legal doctrine and the definition, the conception and the right nature of the property interests in the personality right would be clarified and defined so that protecting the property interests in the personality right can be justified and necessary.Secondly, from the second part to the fifth part, in the way of comparative law research in aspects of the protection modals, the subjects and objects, assignment and succession of this interests, the remedies to the infringement and other relevant legal issues on the property interests in the personality right, the protection framework would be found to establish in the future civil code in our country.Third, in the last part, according to the above analysis and research, it is concluded that protections of the property interest in the personality right should be constituted by the positive protection and the negative protection. The former, positive protection would be related to the personality law which would acknowledge and affirm the assignment, authorized use and the protection of the decedent in the aspect of protecting this property interests. The negative protection would be relevant to damages and other effective remedy methods to the infringement activities in the tort law. It is designed for our country to comprehensively and completely protect the property interests in the personality right.